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Drugs are deceiving
the world and the church
Are Christians selling their souls
for a little Prescription Pottage?
THIRTY-FIVE years ago, at the height of the psychedelic revolution, staff members of the Christian Spirit Magazine, LeRoy and Eloise Gardenier wrote and distributed a tract called Drugs in the Last Days. In it they connected the Greek word pharmakea used in Revelation 9:21 and 18:23 with the deception of drugs that would be used mightily by Satan just before the return of Christ. For the most part, they expected the fulfillment was taking place in the sales of street drugs and in the invasion of drugs in suburban communities all around the world and on every continent. They could never have foretold that its fulfillment would reach as deep and as dark into the personal lives of “god-fearing” America as much as it has.
While many Christian groups are unsettled about political developments, the decay of the judicial system, violence in public schools, the right to life and other issues; a crisis of enormous proportions is fully sneaking in the backdoor and gutting people of their faculties of discernment and spiritual common sense. Drugs, prescribed with the best of intentions (the road to Hell is truly paved with such good intentions) are being used to deceive the unsuspecting person. Especially at risk are the aged who have little defense against wholesale drug prescriptions from the physicians they trust without question These drugs, like Haldol, Ativan, Prozac, et. al. are not merely mind altering drugs, they are mood altering drugs that cause deep chemical reactions in the brain. While designed to curtail and control depression they often have the opposite effect of adding a weird depression that many people believe leads to increased thoughts of suicide as well as other abnormal side effects. It cannot be denied that suicide is on the rise, and it can hardly be denied that psychic drugs have something to do with it. Many drugs, such as Ativan, are by health care to control patients for the convenience of the caretakers. A Clockwork Orange is not just a futuristic Sci-Fi work of literary brilliance. Reality is far beyond the ugly conjectures of that nihilistic scenario. Many experts admit prolonged use can cause irreversible damage to the memory, personality and mood of the user.
These neuroleptics and anti-depressants are not medicines, they are legal psychedelics, and much more, because they are twenty-five years advanced. They are like carpenter ants for the mind. They are designed to hollow out the psyche, do away with the unpleasantries of life’s problems. If the emotion is tough, dark or bleak then do away with it and its memory. Don’t deal with it. If I’m reaping the rotten fruits of a crappy relationship which I built by my own self will and vain half-knowledge then mask it and pretend like it will go away. Other peoples’ minds don’t change just because a drug has altered mine. The unrealistic pretense is that I will be relieved from anxieties and that is the source of my bad relationship(s). Have anxiety about it surgically removed with a pill and it is no longer a problem. Yeah, right! Alfred Adler, pioneer in the field of psychology, once said that most emotional depression and anxiety stems from a person’s loss of courage to face overwhelming problems. Should we trade truth in for madness and call it increased sanity. Should we pretend that things are changed when they are not just for feeling better about ourselves? Should Christians trade in faith and courage for the lifeless “lithium shuffle”? What happen to the beauty of repentance and the faith for the maturity of changes brought on by God’s love and promise for righteousness being fused into our life and behavior?
When someone close to me had a “street” drug problem I was not moved by God to just shrug my shoulders and say, “Well, I hope the person will grow out of it. I think I’ll let it run its course. It might be good for him or her anyway.” I was led to do everything in my power to encourage and help this person stop the drug habit. Christians should be careful! The carpenter ants are in the home and they are being touted as a cure for termites. Sure, they may eat the termites, but where do the carpenter ants go? When is their appetite quenched?
Each one of us has to be sensitive as to how we must deal with a drug usage crisis in our lives and what we should insist upon. Drugs for treatment of physical ailments are obvious in their benefit. The wholesale distribution of ridlin in our schools to young helpless children is a national scandal of growing proportions. A six-year-old kid squirms in his seat and someone thinks about giving him some legal dope. The mental depressions and anxieties we are all susceptible to and have all experienced in one form or another are real and need attention, cure and even some form of therapy. But drugs have too easily become the first and last resort. Love and care are irreplaceable in therapy for the conditions of sickness in the soul and spirit. The church should lead the way in this form of treatment, but alas, the church has sold its birth right for a little worldly soup of drugs and abandoned its needy people and cast off one of the prime blessings of the healer and savior, Jesus Christ.
Brain chemistry ought not be the solution (especially in the long term). Christian support through church/fellowship, family understanding and encouragement and, above all, loving kindness and care should be central to treatment of depression, anxiety, personal problems and anguish. It is especially the duty of the heads of households, elders and pastors to direct, as much as possible, every Christian toward believing that “All things work together for good to those who love God and are called according to his purposes.”
A Final, Final Word: Is there absolutely no use for drugs in medicine or treatment of mental problems? Not at all, there is. But be skeptical and on your guard. Do not accept without question what the world is professing to be a cure; often it is only part of the world’s lack of faith and its own system of salvation. In the last days the whole world will be deceived by drugs. It’s happening now! A person’s sin cannot be dissolved or cured by psyho-medication. We must turn our backs and flee from our sin. Be strong and of good courage and Christ will strengthen you!
A Child Drugged ... New York Times 2010
He was sedated, drooling and overweight from the side effects of the antipsychotic medicine. Although his mother, Brandy Warren, had been at her “wit’s end” when she resorted to the drug treatment, she began to worry about Kyle’s altered personality.
“All I had was a medicated little boy,” Ms. Warren said. “I didn’t have my son. It’s like, you’d look into his eyes and you would just see just blankness.”
Today, 6-year-old Kyle is in his fourth week of first grade, scoring high marks on his first tests. He is rambunctious and much thinner.
Weaned off the drugs through a program affiliated with Tulane University that is
aimed at helping low-income families whose children have mental health problems,
Kyle now laughs easily and teases his family.
Ms. Warren and Kyle’s new doctors point to his remarkable progress — and a more common diagnosis for children of attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder — as proof that he should have never been prescribed such powerful drugs in the first place.
Kyle now takes one drug, Vyvanse, for his attention deficit. His mother shared his medical records to help document a public glimpse into a trend that some psychiatric experts say they are finding increasingly worrisome: ready prescription-writing by doctors of more potent drugs to treat extremely young children, even infants, whose conditions rarely require such measures.
More than 500,000 children and adolescents in America are now taking antipsychotic drugs, according to a September 2009 report by the Food and Drug Administration.
Their use is growing not only among older teenagers, when schizophrenia is believed to emerge, but also among tens of thousands of preschoolers.
A Columbia University study recently found a doubling of the rate of prescribing antipsychotic drugs for privately insured 2- to 5-year-olds from 2000 to 2007. Only 40 percent of them had received a proper mental health assessment, violating practice standards from the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry.
“There are too many children getting on too many of these drugs too soon,” Dr. Mark Olfson, professor of clinical psychiatry and lead researcher in the government-financed study, said.
Such radical treatments are indeed needed, some doctors and experts say, to help young children with severe problems stay safe and in school or day care. In 2006, the F.D.A. did approve treating children as young as 5 with Risperdal if they had autistic disorder and aggressive behavior, self-injury tendencies, tantrums or severe mood swings. Two other drugs, Seroquel from AstraZeneca and Abilify from Bristol-Myers Squibb, are permitted for youths 10 or older with bipolar disorder.
But many doctors say prescribing them for younger and younger children may pose grave risks to development of both their fast-growing brains and their bodies. Doctors can legally prescribe them for off-label use, including in preschoolers, even though research has not shown them to be safe or effective for children. Boys are far more likely to be medicated than girls.
Dr. Ben Vitiello, chief of child and adolescent treatment and preventive research at the National Institute of Mental Health, says conditions in young children are extremely difficult to diagnose properly because of their emotional variability. “This is a recent phenomenon, in large part driven by the misperception that these agents are safe and well tolerated,” he said.
Even the most reluctant prescribers encounter a marketing juggernaut that has made antipsychotics the nation’s top-selling class of drugs by revenue, $14.6 billion last year, with prominent promotions aimed at treating children. In the waiting room of Kyle’s original child psychiatrist, children played with Legos stamped with the word Risperdal, made by Johnson & Johnson. It has since lost its patent on the drug and stopped handing out the toys.
Greg Panico, a company spokesman, said the Legos were not intended for children to play with — only as a promotional item.
Cheaper to medicate
Dr. Lawrence L. Greenhill, president of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, concerned about the lack of research, has recommended a national registry to track preschoolers on antipsychotic drugs for the next 10 years. “Psychotherapy is the key to the treatment of preschool children with severe mental disorders, and antipsychotics are adjunctive therapy — not the other way around,” he said.
But it is cheaper to medicate children than to pay for family counseling, a fact highlighted by a Rutgers University study last year that found children from low-income families, like Kyle, were four times as likely as the privately insured to receive antipsychotic medicines.
Texas Medicaid data obtained by The New York Times showed a record $96 million was spent last year on antipsychotic drugs for teenagers and children — including three unidentified infants who were given the drugs before their first birthdays.
In addition, foster care children seem to be medicated more often, prompting a Senate panel in June to ask the Government Accountability Office to investigate such practices.
In the last few years, doctors’ concerns have led some states, like Florida and California, to put in place restrictions on doctors who want to prescribe antipsychotics for young children, requiring a second opinion or prior approval, especially for those on Medicaid. Some states now report prescriptions are declining as a result.
A study released in July by 16 state Medicaid medical directors, which once had the working title “Too Many, Too Much, Too Young,” recommended that more states require second opinions, outside consultation or other methods to assure proper prescriptions. The F.D.A. has also strengthened warnings about using some of these drugs in treating children.
No medical reason
Kyle was rescued from his medicated state through a therapy program called Early Childhood Supports and Services, established in Louisiana through a confluence of like-minded child psychiatrists at Tulane, Louisiana State University and the state. It surrounds troubled children and their parents with social and mental health support services.
Dr. Mary Margaret Gleason, a professor of pediatrics and child psychiatry at Tulane who treated Kyle from ages 3 to 5 as he was weaned off the heavy medications, said there was no valid medical reason to give antipsychotic drugs to the boy, or virtually any other 2-year-old. “It’s disturbing,” she said.
Dr. Gleason says Kyle’s current status proves he probably never had bipolar disorder, autism or psychosis. His doctors now say Kyle’s tantrums arose from family turmoil and language delays, not any of the diagnoses used to justify antipsychotics.
“I will never, ever let my children be put on these drugs again,” said Ms. Warren, 28, choking back tears. “I didn’t realize what I was doing.”
Dr. Edgardo R. Concepcion, the first child psychiatrist to treat Kyle, said he believed the drugs could help bipolar disorder in little children. “It’s not easy to do this and prescribe this heavy medication,” he said in an interview. “But when they come to me, I have no choice. I have to help this family, this mother. I have no choice.”
Ms. Warren conceded that she resorted to medicating Kyle because she was unprepared for parenthood at age 22, living in difficult circumstances, sometimes distracted. “It was complicated,” she said. “Very tense.”
Behavior problems
Kyle was a healthy baby physically, but he was afraid of some things. He spent hours lining up toys. When upset, he screamed, threw objects, even hit his head on the wall or floor — not uncommon for toddlers, but frightening.
“I’d bring him to the doctor and the doctor would say, ‘You just need to discipline him,’ ” Ms. Warren said. “How can you discipline a 6-month-old?”
When Kyle’s behavior worsened after his brother was born, Ms. Warren turned to a pediatrician, Dr. Martin J. deGravelle. “Within five minutes of sitting with him, he looked at me and said, ‘He has autism, there’s no doubt about it,’ ” Ms. Warren said.
Dr. deGravelle’s clinic notes say Kyle was hyperactive, prone to tantrums, spoke only three words and “does not interact well with strangers.” He prescribed Risperdal.
At the time, Risperdal was approved by the F.D.A. only for adults with schizophrenia or acute manic episodes. The following year it was approved for certain children, 5 and older, with autism and extremely aggressive behavior. It has never been approved by the F.D.A. for use in children younger than 5, although doctors may legally prescribe it as an off-label use.
“Kyle at the time was very aggressive and easily agitated, so you try to find medication that can make him more easily controlled, because you can’t reason with an 18-month-old,” Dr. deGravelle said in a telephone interview. But Kyle was not autistic — according to several later evaluations, including one that Dr. deGravelle arranged with a neurologist. Kyle did not have the autistic child’s core deficit of social interaction, Dr. Gleason said. Instead, he craved more positive attention from his mother.
“He had trouble communicating,” Dr. Gleason said. “He didn’t have people to listen to him.” After the neurologist review, the diagnosis changed to “oppositional defiant disorder” and the Risperdal continued.
“Yes, I did ask for it,” Ms. Warren said. “But I was at my wit’s end, and I didn’t know what else to do.”
Dr. deGravelle referred her to Dr. Concepcion, who in turn diagnosed Kyle’s condition as bipolar disorder. “Some children, when they come to me, the parents are really so frustrated,” Dr. Concepcion said in a phone interview. “Especially the mothers are so scared or desperate in getting help. Their children are really acting psychotic.”
Dr. Concepcion also spoke with Dr. Charles H. Zeanah, a Tulane medical professor, who disagreed with both the diagnosis and the treatment. “I have never seen a preschool child with bipolar disorder in 30 years as a child psychiatrist specializing in early childhood mental health,” Dr. Zeanah said.
More pills
“It’s a controversial diagnosis, I agree with that,” said Dr. Concepcion. “But if you will commit yourself in giving these children these medicines, you have to have a diagnosis that supports your treatment plan. You can’t just give a nondiagnosis and give them the atypical antipsychotic.” He also prescribed four more pills.
Kyle’s third birthday photo shows a pink-cheeked boy who had ballooned to 49 pounds. Obesity and diabetes are childhood risks of antipsychotics. Kyle smiles at the camera. He is sedated.
“His shell was there, but he wasn’t there,” Ms. Warren said. “And I didn’t like that.”
Dr. Concepcion referred Kyle to the early childhood support program, which has helped about 3,000 preschoolers from low-income families at risk for mental health problems since 2002.
His speech improved. He threw fewer tantrums. “They started working with us as a family,” said Ms. Warren, who also received parenting advice. “That helps.” Kyle’s treatment was directed by Dr. Gleason, a Columbia medical graduate who had led a team that wrote 2007 practice guidelines for psychopharmacological treatment of very young children.
“Families sometimes feel the need for a quick fix,” Dr. Gleason said. “That’s often the prescription pad. But I’m concerned that when a child sees someone who prescribes but doesn’t do therapy, they’re closing the door that can make longer-lasting change.”
Off most drugs, Kyle started losing weight and his behavior improved. Ms. Warren’s life also improved. She met a man and they moved into their own house five miles out of Opalousas, a town of 25,000. They were married last Saturday.
At their home recently, Kyle and his brother, Jade, ran and played while their baby sister watched from a playpen. Their clothes were neatly folded in a shared bedroom. They often responded “Yes, ma’am” or “Yes, sir.”
“They’re respectful, but they’re hyper kids,” Ms. Warren said. “Once he came off the medication, he’s Kyle. He’s an intelligent person. He’s loud. He’s funny. He’s smart. He’s bouncy. I mean, there’s never a dull moment. He has a few little behavior issues. But he’s like any other normal 6-year-old.”
Kyle paused to show a reading report card from the end of his kindergarten year, with an A grade. “Awesome job, Kyle!” his kindergarten teacher wrote.
This story originally appeared in The New York Times.
Copyright © 2010 The New York Times
And they weave a spell of deceit
The Drug Companies of Today are the
Tobacco Companies of Last Century
(Christian Spirit 2002)
Eli Lilly Co. (Prozac maker) senior VP and top gun lawyer, Rebecca Gross’s, statement that, ‘There is no scientific evidence that establishes a link between Prozac and violent and suicidal behavior’, resonates with the deceitful verbiage shoveled at us by the likes of RJ Reynolds and Winston & Salem Co. over the last thirty-five years. There may be no scientific evidence of the laboratory kind Ms. Gross, but there is prevailing evidence of corpses falling along the highway of life and minds ruined forever locked way in mental institutions or specters of human beings pushing shopping carts toward cardboard hotels behind our nation’s shopping malls where no one can see.
Eli Lilly is not the face of all evil, however. The legal traffickers in drugs are not confined to one powerful company. The corporate banner from the 1950s of one of our large chemical companies has become a slogan more suited to describe what has become a national religion: ‘better living through chemistry’. Since the disaster of U.S financial ruin, chemical companies, especially drugs for consumption, have become one of the prime American bread winners, if not the prime money maker. They are now untouchable because of their economic value to the national and international economy. Doctors, now working for medical corporations and health plans are literally forced by employers to sell, even push drugs, or find themselves out on the street. What should be most alarming to Christians is that out of the 13 million souls (as of 2000) who have taken prescription Prozac, not to mention the even greater millions who are taking some sort of mind altering drug for manic behavior, bulimia, schizophrenia, obsessive, manic and bipolar disorders, etc. etc., many are Christians themselves. Sadly, they have chosen to rely on drug addiction rather than Jesus Christ, His Gospel and the Holy Ghost.
The American Psychiatrists Association has, one by one, diagnosed every, and all psychological problems as stemming from physiological reasons. All disorders are now attributed to either an imbalance of the bodies’ biochemistry or a genetic root. This in spite of the lack of scientific proof. If anything should be noted as being unproven and theoretical in the field of mental health this should be. There is no hard evidence to prove or support this wild claim. The myth of all mental problems stemming from genetic and bio-chemical reasons has, however, become a fact in the public’s mind, one as unshakeable as the theory of evolution, and just a substantiated by true fact. Propagating this myth, however, suits the purpose of the APA, the medical profession, the drug companies and, most of all, the deceitful heart of man.
Economically it is good business for drug companies, the psychiatric and medical professions. Insurance companies more readily pay for physical disease and ailment, believing they can be objectively and scientifically diagnosed. Diagnosis of any mental
disorder, on the other hand, is much more subjective and is open to immeasurable fraud. So then, one fraud is avoided to create yet a greater more devastating one. People are now being taught and convinced that problems with our minds are unavoidable and due to natural chemical deficiencies in the brain. Erratic and aggressive behavior, social deviancy and abnormality, pessimism, violence and all other psychotic behavior, including depression, anxiety and thoughts of suicide are beyond our control and have nothing to do with our life style, decisions in life or a matter of will. Translated, this means we are not culpable, there is no responsibility for the condition of our mind, no repercussions from the choices we make, no price to pay for the way we have treated others, no cost to our sin. In other words, there is no reaping what we sew. We are not responsible for our own acts. And now the heart of the Gospel about man’s condition, that he must repent, is gone. There is no need for repentance, because there is nothing to repent about. It ain’t my fault.
This is the bottom line and why drug use and blaming physiology is so wonderfully convenient for the human mind which wishes to be a vagabond on the trail of honest living. We can blame it on a genetic fault or screwed up brain chemistry. Either way, it is not our fault. This is what mind altering drug use says today. I am absolved. People can bury themselves in a hole of numbness; hide behind a rock of bliss. We believe we are justified in taking leave of our problems, so we take leave of our senses.
It is one thing for a person in the world to buy into this big deceit; the addiction is real and it is difficult to overcome once one shuffles into its lobotomy like trap. It is also understandable if someone comes to Christ but is already on prescription drugs to have to carefully, under a physician’s watchful eye, get weaned away from their toxic spiritual affects. But the growing numbers of professing born again believers who exchange the psychiatry of Jesus and the Holy Ghost and the Word of God for a script of mind candy is appalling and disheartening to the Lord.
But modern man loves this mind candy. Why didn’t we think of this before, they might ask? The reason is because Satan has reserved this mighty deception for the end times. It is an enormous deception. The whole world is being deceived by drugs. Ironically, it is not so much the street, illegal drugs. Not the heroine our daughters and sons experiment with, but the legit drugs developed by companies and universities. We are taking them to counteract a concocted mythological bio-chemical imbalance. In turn they cause what they profess to cure. The reality often remains: we still have problems. The bad relationship, the insecurity, and above all the sin. Many problems are caused by our misdeeds, our sins, and our ignorance, at the root, however, is our innate selfishness and madness for coveting. The Bible hits at the heart of the matter when it notes: ‘in [man’s] heart dwells no good thing.’ Pills do not dissolve sin or change the heart, they can only tamper with the mind to give us the false impression that things within us and within others are actually changing for the better. But sin always gives us bad inner feelings - as well they should - but we want good feelings so we can hold on to our self and keep our defective sin. Anything other than “hedonism of mind” is taboo today. Pills can do the trick. So we sell our souls like Esau did for a little pottage, a little vial, a little try at a new script. So some fill their bellies, some quench their appetite, some sooth their soul and alter their brain chemistry instead of the set of their heart. And then what? Will we be able to find repentance then, or shall we seek it with many bitter tears and not be able to find it. What then? Reach for another brown plastic vial?